Our Family Beginnings

I’ll admit, this book, and the questions therein were hard for me to answer this time around. It isn’t because the topics were any more challenging than any other adoption triad issue, but because for our son, we are not in an open adoption. Our son’s first mother chose for the adoption to be closed. We know her name, but she doesn’t know ours. We know about some of her likes, political leanings, and some of her family situation. She knows less about us, by her choice. Via our agency, we have offered up letters, pictures and information about how our shared child is growing. So far though, our agency has reminded us that she is not interested in contact. Therefore, reading a book about first mothers is much like reading my psychology texts in grad school, learning about a population I may never encounter.

As soon as I typed that last sentence though, I realized one of the great premises of the book. First parents are all around us, everyday, and we don’t know it. It isn’t something that tends to come up in conversation, and generally shows no visible scars. That’s also why this was a very important book for me to read while my son is merely learning how to sound out words. Respect is a lesson that every human deserves, and in the absence of contact with his birth family, I must teach him how to respect a person that is simultaneously important and yet, invisible.

How do adoptive parents best accomplish the possibly counterintuitive goals of 1) respecting the birthparents’ right to define their role in the lives of their birthchildren (how often, in what way, the relationship is maintained) and 2) nurture the expectation that birthparents will maintain lifelong involvement?

Part 1 for us is, for now, less of a challenge.  V’s birthmother wants no contact, and he won’t be old enough to inquire about locating her in a deliberate fashion for a few years.  She is a person who deserves the privacy she requested, and we can honor that for the time being.  At some point though, he may want to meet her or his extended birth family.  If he does, it will be our job as parents to continue help him learn about his adoption circumstances as best we know them, and support him in that journey. Our job will be to, as best we can, utilize some of the teachings in this book.  His mother may not want a relationship, or may be ambivalent about it.  She’s a person, and I don’t know enough about her to have any idea how she views adoption.  I can’t control how either of them will react to the other, but I can support our son and respect his mother without fear or judgment of the process.  My job, as an adoptive parent, is to provide a safe and supportive environment for all of us.  We are a family, all of us, and the more family that V can have, the better.

Gritter states “the most fundamental [goal] is that birthparents will successfully recover from the trauma of the experience.” Can someone successfully recover from the trauma of placing their child for adoption? What does this mean in this context?

I don’t think there is a “one size fits all” goal here, at least not in a tangible sense.  No matter what the challenge, I think all that we can do as people is do the best that we can with the tools that we have.  Sometimes that means utilizing those tools to get even more tools, and step-ladder our way to something as challenging as recovering from the trauma of adoption placement.  I also think that it is disingenuous to assume that all first parents will see adoption as traumatic.  I’m not a birthparent, and have not been in the shoes of someone who has had to make that choice.  But the span of human emotion is vast and varied.  The one commonality that birthparents share is that they gave life to a child that they, for one reason or another, did not parent. I don’t know why V’s mother chose not to parent him.  I don’t know if she thinks about him all the time or merely in passing. I don’t know if she regrets the decision or if the reasons for choosing adoption are ones that still hold now and will hold in twenty, thirty, or fifty years from now.  All I know is that I don’t know, and can’t guess or judge in the absence of information.  She is a person who found herself in a difficult circumstance where adoption, for one reason or another, was the decision she made.

Primarily, even as an adoptive parent, I want families to remain intact whenever they can do so without danger to the child.  People don’t need to be rich to be happy, and don’t need all of the latest and greatest toys to be successful.  That being said, when firstparents come to a decision about adoption, I can only hope that it is with support and understanding of those around them.  I also hope that is something that the firstparents are deciding on their own terms, without pressure from clergy or family or, dare I say, adoptive parents and adoption agencies.  The decision to not parent one’s child is a serious one with deep implications in so many lives.  We will all make life altering decisions throughout our days, and we are the ones who will need to either find peace in those choices or learn to live with the pain that they may cause us and others.

To continue to the next leg of this book tour, please visit the main list at The Open Adoption Examiner.